One of the four organists who play the great organ of Notre-Dame de Paris is in Palm Beach tonight. Vincent Dubois takes the console at the Basilica of St. Edward, 144 N. County Road, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 15, and he is not coming alone: classical accordionist Marie-Andrée Joerger shares the program, an organ-and-accordion pairing that most people on the island will never have heard in a church.

Who is playing

Dubois is one of the titular organists of the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. The Archdiocese of Paris announced the current team in April 2024, ahead of the cathedral's reopening: Olivier Latry, Vincent Dubois and Thierry Escaich as titular organists, with Thibault Fajoles as deputy, sharing the instrument in rotation. Dubois and Latry were the two already in post when fire tore through the cathedral in 2019, which makes Dubois one of the few musicians who played that organ before the fire and plays it again now.

According to his biography from his American management, he won the Notre-Dame post in January 2016 through an audition and competition, after earlier tenures at Soissons Cathedral and Saint-Brieuc Cathedral. He also teaches organ interpretation and improvisation at the Hochschule für Musik in Saarbrücken, Germany. Titular organist at Notre-Dame is about as senior a church music job as exists, and the people who hold it do not often turn up on a Thursday night on County Road.

Why an accordion

The organ and the accordion are cousins: both make sound by pushing air across reeds or through pipes, both can sustain a note as long as the air holds, and both are at home in dance music. Dubois and Joerger have built a duo repertoire around exactly that overlap. This fall they are on what the listing for their Miami date calls their first official United States tour together.

The Palm Beach program has not been posted in detail, but the duo's touring repertoire, as listed for the Miami concert, gives a sense of the night: orchestral transcriptions and folk-inspired pieces from Khachaturian's Masquerade Waltz, Debussy's Petite Suite, Fauré's Dolly Suite, Poulenc's Suite française and Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances, closing with tango by Richard Galliano and Astor Piazzolla. In other words, this is not a solemn evening of fugues. Expect waltzes and tango in a 100-year-old church.

The organ they are playing

The instrument is worth the trip on its own. St. Edward was built in 1926 in the Spanish Renaissance style, with twin towers, a Spanish tile roof and three sets of bronze doors, and it has long been a place of worship for presidents in town: John and Jacqueline Kennedy and George H.W. and Barbara Bush were parishioners. The church reaches its centennial this season.

Its organ dates to 1938, when George Kilgen & Son installed its Opus 6045. Decades later the organ builder R.A. Colby rebuilt the instrument's mechanical and electrical systems and expanded its resources while cleaning and keeping the original Kilgen pipework and voicing intact. In 2023 the church added a second console on a movable platform that duplicates the main one, so the organist can play from the main floor of the sanctuary instead of hidden up in the gallery. For a visiting virtuoso, that is the difference between a sound coming from somewhere behind you and a performance you can actually watch.

If you go

The recital starts at 7 p.m. at the Basilica of St. Edward, 144 N. County Road, near Royal Poinciana Way. A name like this draws a crowd, so plan to arrive early, and check with the parish on seating before you go. The tour itself is short: after Palm Beach, the duo plays the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Savannah on Sunday, Oct. 18, and Florida International University's Wertheim Performing Arts Center in Miami on Tuesday, Oct. 20. If you cannot make tonight, Miami is the only other Florida date.

Why it matters for the island

Palm Beach is used to big names arriving in season, booked into ballrooms and theaters. This one is quieter and arguably rarer: a musician who plays one of the most famous organs in the world, choosing a parish church on County Road as the first of three American dates, on an instrument that has been in that church since 1938. It is the kind of night people mention for years afterward. Go, sit close to the console, and listen for the moment the accordion and the pipes land on the same note.